Bone Palace, The - Amanda Downum Page 0,40
attacked. It might have been easier to track the thieves from the palace crypts, but also easier to draw attention and unwanted questions. At least the trail here was fresher.
The door shut with a metallic clang behind them and echoes scattered and sank beneath the rush of water. The sewer didn’t care about day or night—its blackness was absolute. A carriage rattled overhead, and the clatter of hooves and wheels echoed painfully.
They kept careful counts of turns and branches, but the tunnels in Oldtown all looked the same and getting lost was far too easy. If Isyllt had brought any food, she might have trailed crumbs behind her like the children in cradle-stories. Not that the sewer rats needed more to eat, by the size of those who so brazenly crossed their path. A pity she couldn’t talk to them and save herself some detective work.
She found the site of the attack after two wrong turns, or at least a stretch of sewer that looked promising. Isyllt drew a knife—not the kukri at her back, but a razor-honed folding blade that fit neatly in her pocket—and pricked her left wrist. A drop of blood glistened black in the pale light, and washed metal-and-seaweed over her tongue as she licked it away. Her instructors at the Arcanost would chide her for needing to draw her own blood—she was filled with it, after all—but she’d always found the spell easier with the taste of it sticky in her mouth.
With a whispered word, light blossomed on her wounded wrist and on the damp stone ledge, a pale blue no brighter than cave lichen. From the shape of the stains she could see where the vampire had first bitten her, where blood had dripped from her shoulder and later splattered as she shook him off. The trail ended with the ledge.
Now that she knew where to look, Isyllt could also see the shadow-faint outline of the secret door in the wall. She kept her eyes away; Khelséa didn’t lead a cohort by being inobservant.
“This is it.” The pounding water drowned her words, and she shouted the next. “The water carried one away, and I imagine the other followed.”
Khelséa gestured ahead with a flourish. “After you, Crown Investigator.” Isyllt read the shape of the words instead of hearing them.
Isyllt sniffed, hoping to catch the scent of vrykoloi, but all she got was a noseful of wet shit and offal. She shook her head with a grimace and started walking.
They followed the current for several turns, but finally came to a fork where the water rushed left and right. Isyllt sent her witchlight back and forth over the ground and along both arches; peperine bricks glittered with dark flecks of magnetite and brighter mica, beautiful amidst the filth, but she saw no sign of anything having chosen one tunnel over the other. Finally she leaned back against the wall and sighed in disgust.
“Do you have a coin we can flip?” she yelled to Khelséa. Echoes bounced off slime-slick stones.
“I thought,” a familiar voice said from the darkness, soft but carrying, “that you were going to wait for me.”
Khelséa spun, pistol shining in her hand, and Isyllt flung out a hand before she could pull the trigger. Her heart spiked sharp in her chest. “Don’t! He’s—” Safe was definitely not the word. “Not a threat,” she finished half-heartedly. “Are you, Spider?”
“Not to you or yours, necromancer.” He stepped into the light and Khelséa’s breath hissed through clenched teeth. In the darkness and witchfire it was hard to believe he could ever walk the streets unnoticed, glamourie or no. Gaunt and grotesque, inhuman. Demonic.
Isyllt realized that she’d never talked to Khelséa about consorting with demons, and if the inspector might ever condone it. Maybe that was a conversation to have with plenty of wine, too.
“It seemed a pity to waste the daylight,” Isyllt said, stepping neatly between Khelséa and Spider. From the corner of her eye she saw the inspector lower her pistol, but not holster it. “I thought you’d be sleeping.” She blushed, and gave thanks for the darkness.
He chuckled. “You’ve been reading the wrong sort of stories. Oh, yes,” he said when she raised an eyebrow. “I follow the penny dreadfuls.”
“You should write some of your own, if the others are so inaccurate.”
His grin bared his fangs, and the gaps around them that let him close his jaw. Like an animal’s. “I don’t think your citizens would like to read the truth of us.”
Isyllt snorted. “We